The Pink Ghetto Read online

  He waved away my worrywartiness. “I’ve never missed a plane.”

  I showered and dressed in record time, and we headed out to Powell’s City of Books. It was a big place, requiring a map to navigate. Of course we ended up losing more time there than we had intended. As a result, we were late getting to the airport, where the security line snaked around for what looked like miles.

  One good thing about arriving late, though—it allowed me to forget about the horrors ahead. And Fleishman, very considerately, bought some motion sickness tablets for me at the airport newsstand/pharmacy. This might have had something to do with the fact that we had switched seats upon check-in so we could sit together.

  And we did make it, Fleishman pointed out after we had sprinted to our gate. “In fact, it’s a good thing we arrived when we did. Otherwise we would have just been sitting around.”

  That was Fleishman logic for you.

  We were all being shuffled like cattle past first class when I noticed a very familiar person ensconced in one of the oversized leatherette chairs, holding a Bloody Mary. Dan!

  As if sensing my unbelieving stare, he looked up. I detected a brief flash of embarrassment, but he recovered quickly. That dazzling grin was back in place in no time. “Well, fancy meeting you here.”

  This is his idea of an early flight? Twelve-thirty PM?

  I wanted to give him a solid thump on the head. What had been the point of lying to me last night? Was he worried I was going to hold him hostage in the hotel bar?

  “Maybe we can get together back in NYC,” he suggested.

  “Sounds great.”

  “Let’s do lunch,” he said in a pseudo-mocking voice.

  I chuckled, then moved along.

  When we were safely in plebian class, Fleishman looked back at me, eyebrows arched. “But you say he’s a good agent, huh?”

  “Yeah.” I blew out a breath and reached for the in-flight magazine. “One part good agent, three parts baloney sandwich.”

  Fleishman and I parted ways at the airport, so I ended up going home alone. When I opened the door, Wendy was scrubbing the woodwork with a toothbrush and HGTV was blaring the most recent episode of House Hunters.

  “Hey!” I said.

  She looked up. She didn’t seem overjoyed to see me.

  Still, it was great to be home. I collapsed in a chair by the table and looked around the apartment, which I had actually missed. I had especially missed…

  I looked around, feeling a moment of panic. Max was nowhere in evidence.

  “What did you do with Max?” It was embarrassing to admit how reliant I was on canine affection these days.

  “He’s in jail.”

  She nodded to the corner, where Maxwell was in a plastic dog carrier with a wire barred door. It did look like a jail. He was amazingly quiet, though his brown eyes looked up at me beseechingly and I could tell by his swaying movement that somewhere in that plastic box, his tail was thumping.

  “What was his crime?”

  “He chewed my boots.”

  I trembled in fear for Maxwell. No wonder he was quiet…it was a miracle he was still alive.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  She kept scrubbing. “Where’s Fleishman?”

  “He decided he wanted to go to Connecticut to wheedle money out of his dad to pay for the trip.”

  She leveled an exasperated stare at me. “About that trip…?”

  “Honestly, Wendy, I had no idea Fleish was going to go to Portland and leave you here alone. None.”

  She harrumphed. “What is going on with you two?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You always say that.”

  “I know, and it’s always true. Well, almost always.”

  “So he just followed you on a business trip to…?”

  It was embarrassing to say, but I had to admit it. “To meet romance writers.”

  She sent me an inscrutable look. “Okay, just answer me this. Am I in the way here? I mean apart from serving as an impromptu dogsitter, of course.”

  “In the way?” I asked, shocked. “What are you talking about? You’re my best friend.”

  “Right. The person you never listen to. The person who gets treated like a fifth wheel.”

  Oh my God. I had no idea she felt that way. Though I suppose I should have had an inkling. “I’m sorry, Wendy. I never wanted you to feel shut out from anything. It’s just that you’re always so busy now, with school and your job, and…”

  From the amount of gunk she was taking off with that toothbrush, I would guess that the baseboards hadn’t been cleaned since they were painted, and from the yellow-white hue of the paint, that had been a few decades.

  Still, it never would have occurred to me to scrub them.

  “And you do realize you’re approaching Joan Crawford territory, don’t you?” I asked her.

  She let out a long breath. “I’ll bet Joan Crawford never had to put up with filth and dog pee and weirdness from her roommates…”

  “You think I’m weird?” I asked.

  “Not you…” She reconsidered. “Or, yes, you. You and Fleishman are a weird combo.”

  “I told you, nothing is going on.”

  “Yes, that’s what I’m gathering. And you know what’s going to happen?”

  I shook my head.

  “Nothing.”

  “That’s fine by me,” I declared. “We’re just friends.”

  She dropped her toothbrush into the soapy water, where it landed with a splash. “Bullshit. Don’t tell me that you don’t have expectations.”

  “I don’t,” I said.

  “You do, and you’re going to be disappointed. Over and over and over.”

  “How do you know that? Can you read into his heart?”

  “His heart? Are we still teenagers? I can read into his actions. And what I read there is someone who doesn’t give a damn about either of us. You don’t see it. You’re still seeing the glow from college, when he was the cool guy on campus who had taken a shine to you. Back then we all hung out and talked about our hopes and ambitions. But now I’m following my dreams and working my tail off, and you’re working your tail off, and Fleishman’s still hanging out talking about his ambitions. He’s Peter Pan with a writing bug.”

  “Writing’s not easy.”

  “You think it’s easy to become a lighting designer? Or an editor?” She shook her head. “It’s not that I don’t like the guy, although I’ll admit he’s wearing thin. I just don’t want to be his serving girl anymore.”

  “Then get off your knees and stop scrubbing,” I said. “Don’t do more work than you think you should.”

  “But if I didn’t do it, nobody else would, either. I don’t want to live that way.”

  “In other words, you can’t win. That’s twisted.”

  She leaned back against the wall. “I think I’m going crazy, Rebecca.”

  She really did look stressed out. Working and going to school was no picnic, and she’d been doing it for years now. I felt bad that I had added to her stress this weekend. And I shouldn’t have compared her to Joan Crawford. “Don’t give up, Wen. One more year and you’ll be done.”

  “One more year, and then maybe I’ll be an unemployed lighting designer and full time coffee server.” She blew out a breath. “You know how some women just want to get married but they suck at relationships?”

  I nodded.

  “I just want a nice apartment but I suck at making money.”

  “You’ll get there someday.” I looked nervously at the television and reached for the remote. “In the meantime, maybe you should stop watching this channel.”

  “I know. It’s like heroin for the home-obsessed.”

  “It seems like we’re all battling weird addictions,” I said.

  Her lips twisted into a frown and she darted a glance in the general direction of Fleishman’s room. “Except some. For some it’s indulge, indulge, indulge.” She shot me a look that had a twinge m
ore sympathy. “Just watch out, Rebecca. It’s a throwaway society we live in. People can get tossed out, too.”

  Poor Wendy. She’d been doing way too many of those depressing plays.

  On my way in to work on Monday, I met Rita standing in her outer office. She exhaled a cloud of smoke for me to walk through—her version of a welcome mat. “How’d it go?”

  “Not too bad,” I said.

  Now that I was home, just surviving the weekend at all seemed like an achievement. I had never been so glad to be walking into this office building. I got on the elevator—secretly hoping, as always, for a Suave Guy encounter—with a spring in my step. My heels turned to cement, though, when the doors slid open and I saw Muriel’s expectant face.

  “I told my friend that you were on a conference trip this weekend and probably wouldn’t have gotten much reading done,” she said, though you could tell she hoped I would contradict her. “Isn’t that right?”

  “I’ll get to it this week,” I promised.

  I’d forgotten the rule: Never make promises.

  I did go back to my office intending to get The Rancher and the Lady off the shelf, but in the end I spent most of the morning doing my expense report. I deducted Fleishman’s half of the room service, not to mention the drinks the scoundrel had treated his new author friends to and then charged to my room.

  Around ten o’clock, I got a phone call. It was Lisa, Mercedes’s admin assist. “Mercedes would like to speak to you for a few minutes.”

  My heartbeat stopped momentarily. “When?”

  There was a pause, and the pause meant duh. “Like, maybe, now?”

  “Oh! Okay, I’ll be right there.”

  After I’d crossed the door on slightly wobbly knees, Lisa waved me on through and I knocked on Mercedes’s door.

  “Entrez-vous!”

  I poked my head in.

  She looked up at me and smiled. “Just who I wanted to see,” she said, as if my coming into her office were an unexplainable bit of serendipity. As if I hadn’t been summoned.

  Maybe this was just her way of lightening the mood. I had the awful feeling that I was about to be scolded for bad conference performance.

  Mercedes plopped into her chair, let out a long sigh, and muttered, “Mon dieu! Where to begin?”

  I wondered if bringing your ex-boyfriend to a romance conference, even unintentionally, was a firing offense.

  But Mercedes didn’t mention that. Instead, she asked, “Have you heard about our counseling benefit?”

  I shifted in my chair, wondering where this was leading. “I think I might have read a pamphlet at some time or another…”

  “Well, the long and short of it is, there are options. Every calendar year you have three free visits to a counselor, or you can enroll in a smoking cessation program, or one of the other approved programs on the list. I believe there’s a Web site that lists them all. One of them is for alcohol abuse counseling.”

  I nodded.

  She kept her eyes fixed on me.

  There was something she was trying to communicate to me by imparting this information; I frowned in concentration to try to figure it out. Did she want me to stage a smoking cessation intervention for Rita? Beyond that, my mind was a blank.

  “Comprenez-vous?” she asked.

  “Um…not really,” I admitted.

  She put her hands before her on her desk, threading her fingers. “We’ve gotten a few reports about your wild weekend in Portland.”

  Uh-oh. Here it came. I sank down in my chair.

  “Not from Barb Simmons, whom you probably met.”

  I nodded. I met her, Fleishman met her…

  “Barb loved your—”

  “Friend,” I piped up quickly.

  Mercedes cleared her throat. “I was going to say, Barb loved your speech.”

  “Oh.” I shouldn’t have interrupted her. I felt compelled to say, “But that man really is just my roommate. And he’s a RAG member.”

  “I’ve heard this man was your roommate in Portland, too.”

  “I swear, it wasn’t planned. At least by me. It just sort of—”

  She waved away my protests. “You don’t need to explain to me. I think taking an amor with you on your business trip is admirably French. Of course, it probably raised a few eyebrows.”

  Oh dear.

  “One of the authors of an editor here said you had a lover’s quarrel out in the hallway. She said she barely got a wink of sleep all night.”

  Cynthia. Damn it. And she probably told Cassie, who probably went sprinting to tell Mercedes at 8:01 AM this morning.

  I shook my head. “It will never happen again.”

  “Good. As I said, however, this was not what concerned me.”

  There was something else?

  “Frankly, Rebecca, it’s your drinking problem.”

  I blinked at her. I had a drinking problem? I know I had a few glasses of wine at the restaurant with Dan, but lots of people had been drinking. And I had deducted the minibar charges from my expense report.

  She prompted gently, “The airplane?”

  That unpleasant memory flooded back, and I practically hit myself on the head. “I was airsick.”

  Her brows arched skeptically.

  “No, really,” I said. “I’m terrified of planes, and then my—well, he’s just my roommate, like I said—he said I should eat some pancakes and—”

  “I see,” she said, cutting me off. “Say no more.”

  I wasn’t sure she did see. In fact, I had a sneaking suspicion she actually believed that I was lying through my teeth and that I kept a fully stocked bar in my metal file cabinet. (Or perhaps that would be admirably French, too.) She probably thought I ended up all my business meetings with a lampshade on my head. I’m sure I looked guilty as hell.

  “It was all just a big mistake,” I said. “I’m sorry if I caused any damage to Candlelight.”

  Contrition seemed to be exactly what she was looking for. “I’m sure you did fine.”

  Fine, except that I came off like a sex-crazed, vomiting wino.

  “And it sounds like your speech went over well. So I’m going to see if Rita will send you to Wichita Falls.”

  I craned my head. “Where?”

  “Wichita Falls, Texas. They have a great little conference there every August.”

  I was dismissed, and I stomped back to my office. The moment I had left Mercedes, embarrassment had been displaced by rage at Cassie. Telling Mercedes I was an alcoholic?

  This was war.

  Andrea hurried into my office. “What happened? This place is buzzing!”

  “About what?” I asked.

  “About you.” She shut my door quietly. “My God, that conference sounds like it was just one nonstop blowout.”

  “Uh…not exactly.”

  She plunked herself down in my chair and leaned forward. “So who is this incredibly cute guy you’re living with, and why didn’t you tell me about him?”

  “There’s nothing to tell.”

  “And you let me go on about the elevator guy and Dan Weatherby! Jesus. It sounds like your squeeze is much better.”

  “He’s not my squeeze. He’s my roommate.”

  She blinked. “Then what was he doing in your hotel room?”

  “He was…well, he was in Portland and he needed a place to stay.”

  I’m not sure she believed me. “What happened at the dinner with Dan Weatherby?”

  I shook my head.

  “Oh.” She looked completely bummed on my behalf, which was comforting. “Jesus, it sounds like my weekend was better than yours, and all I did was clean my bathroom.”

  “Where is Wichita Falls?” I asked.

  “Texas.”

  “The pleasantly cool, picturesque part?”

  She shook her head slowly. “The hot, dry, flat part.”

  I let out a long sigh. Texas in August. Mercedes might not have fired me, but I had a feeling my stock was falling.
/>   Chapter 11

  I was so involved in debating between a low-fat apple cranberry bran muffin and a full-butter blueberry muffin with chunky sugar crystal sprinkles that I almost didn’t notice Troy in front of me in the coffee shop line, even though he was practically sagging across the counter for support. I put my hand on his elbow.

  He jumped, nearly upsetting the herbal teabag display. “Rebecca. Hi. What are you here for?”

  “Just a muffin,” I said. “I’ve decided that not buying expensive coffee is the least I can do to economize. So I buy the muffin and just breathe the fumes.”

  He clucked in sympathy. “Oh, that’s so Grapes of Wrath. Like you just climbed off the Joad’s rickety truck.”

  I laughed, but he didn’t join me. He seemed down, and I’m sure it wasn’t because of my lack of funds. “You really look like you could use some caffeine,” I said.

  He held up a paper to-go cup. “This is round two for me. Triple-shot espresso.”

  “Is something wrong?”

  “I just spent twenty minutes locked in an office with Hurricane Cassie.”

  “Oh!”

  “My God—she’s like the Wicked Witch of the west wing of Candlelight Books!”

  “If only we could throw water on her and melt her.”

  “She’s got some whackjob author who has decided that we should promote her trilogy about amnesiac grooms as though it’s Danielle Steel. It’s crazy. But now Cassie is acting as if this woman should actually be given foil lettering on her covers.”

  Darlene! I had forgotten about her and our conversation in Portland. I trained my eyes on the muffins. I felt like a turncoat. I had only wanted to cause problems for Cassie, not for Troy.

  “There has to be something we can do about her,” Troy said, drumming his fingers on the glass. “Do you think if we shoved a little money under Art Salvatore’s door he would hire one of his goons…er, friends…to take care of Cassie for us?”

  “That’s just a rumor, remember?” I smiled. “Besides, where would we get the money?”

  “From sending around a collection plate!” he said. “For this job, we’d have money for the hit and enough left over to send me and the Calvin Klein underwear model to Cancun.”